The United States has been snarling at Cuba’s Fidel Castro for so long that it’s hard to believe he ever visited our shores. But he did, three times—most notably, in September 1960. Where did he go? New York, of course.
NOT YOUR ORDINARY TOURIST
Cuba was (and still is) a permanent member of the United Nations, so in September 1960, Fidel Castro—just a year and a half after overthrowing the island nation’s American-supported military dictator, Fulgencio Batista—chose to exercise his right to speak before the U.N.’s annual meeting at its headquarters in New York City. Castro was looking to legitimize himself in the world’s eyes as the country’s leader. Relations between the U.S. government and Cuba were already unfriendly, though—Castro hadn’t yet officially declared himself a communist, but he had been busy nationalizing American-owned companies in Cuba like Texaco, Esso, and Shell, and foreign-owned banks, including the First National City Bank of New York and the Chase Manhattan Bank. The American government wasn’t happy to have Castro on its turf, but there was nothing it could do to prevent him from going to the United Nations. The feds did, however, order the Cuban delegation not to leave Manhattan.
CASTRO WAS HERE
On September 18, Castro and his entourage of about 50 arrived at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport and drove through downtown Manhattan, waving at crowds of supporters. (Unfortunately, someone in the crowd roughly shoved Castro’s waving arm, which prompted the Cuban president to file the first of many official complaints about his treatment in the city.) The cars finally made it to their destination, the Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue.
Finding a hotel for the Cubans hadn’t been easy: None of the hotels near the U.N. were willing to take them in, and it wasn’t until the U.N. and U.S. State Department leaned on Edward Spatz, owner of the Shelburne, that Spatz agreed to let the Cubans stay there. But to demonstrate his displeasure, Spatz hung a big American flag outside the hotel…and refused to hang a Cuban one. He also insisted that the Cubans pay for their rooms in advance, in cash, and he wanted them to put down a $10,000 deposit in case of damage. And to top it all off, according to the Cubans, their rooms at the Shelburne were tiny. Castro was furious.
Dutch name for Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in the 17th century: Punkiesberg.
To make matters worse, the press reported that Castro and his group had brought in live chickens to pluck and cook, that they were tossing burning cigars onto the rugs, and that they were generally trashing their rooms. The reports were unsubstantiated, but after just 24 hours, Castro decided that enough was enough. His entire Cuban delegation stormed out of the Shelburne and headed for the United Nations.
A STUNT IS BORN
When the Cubans appeared at U.N. headquarters, they went straight to the office of Dag Hammarskjöld, the U.N. Secretary-General. There, Castro complained about his treatment at the Shelburne and the lack of hospitality from New Yorkers, and threatened to sleep in Central Park.
Somehow Hammarskjöld managed to get the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street to offer rooms—at no charge—but Castro refused to accept what he called “charity.” In fact, he already had a backup plan: the rundown Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where he’d made arrangements with owner Love B. Woods for several rooms. As it turned out, the dramatic departure from the Shelburne had been planned—so that Castro could spurn the fancy midtown venue and install himself among the “common” people of Harlem, where he expected to receive sympathy and a warm welcome.
The Hotel Theresa on 7th Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard) was a Harlem landmark. From its opening in 1913 until 1940, it was a whites-only hotel that made exceptions for a few African-American celebrities. That changed in the 1940s and ’50s, when it was taken over by new management, catered to a high-class African-American clientele, and became known as the “Waldorf-Astoria of Harlem.”
By 1960, it was no longer at the height of its glory, but the Hotel Theresa’s history and location suited the Cuban delegation perfectly. Thousands of black New Yorkers lined the streets around the building, hoping for a glimpse of the hero of the Cuban revolution. The move proved to be less convenient for the NYPD. The hotel was five miles from the U.N., and the long trip made it harder to protect the Cuban delegation.
Four NY governors who became U.S. presidents: Martin Van Buren Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS
Castro spent less than two weeks in New York, but he kept as busy as any tourist. He met with international leaders friendly (or at least somewhat friendly) to his cause—Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Gomulka of Poland, among others—but most important of the lot was Premier Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, who came to see him in Harlem. Khrushchev used his visit to Harlem to show solidarity with Castro and to highlight what he called “the discriminatory policies of the United States of America toward Negroes, as well as toward Cuba.” But Khrushchev was also shocked by what he found when he arrived at Castro’s suites: The Hotel Theresa’s rooms were pretty shabby to begin with, and the Cubans had made them even worse, tossing old cigar butts (among other things) on the floors.
Khrushchev wasn’t the Cubans’ only visitor, though. Malcolm X, whose Organization of Afro-American Unity later had offices at the Theresa, visited Castro, and so did poets Allen Ginsburg and Langston Hughes.
THE GRAND FINALE
Annual sessions of the General Assembly were traditionally conducted with diplomacy, even when speeches got heated. Not in 1960, however. This was the year when Khrushchev pounded the table with his shoe, shouted at British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, raged at Dag Hammarskjöld, and spoke to the U.N. delegates for more than two hours in October. But those two hours of Premier Khrushchev were nothing compared to the speech Castro delivered at the general session on September 26. After telling the gathered U.N. representatives and dignitaries that he would “endeavor to be brief,” Castro launched into a speech that lasted for more than four hours.
Two days later, he was back in Cuba, telling his citizens that the United States was a cowardly place where Cubans were brutalized, blacks were persecuted, and everyone was motivated by money. They were lucky, he said, to live in a country where people recognized the truth and had something to fight for.
The United States ended diplomatic relations with Cuba the next year and more than four decades of strained interactions between the two countries followed—including the extremes of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Castro did come to the U.S. once more in 1979, again to address the United Nations, but that visit lacked the drama of the 1960 trip.
In the late 1800s, Nathanial Lord Britton and Elizabeth Knight (husband-and-wife botany professors at Columbia University) went on a trip to England, where they visited London’s Royal Botanic Garden. The pair was inspired to create a similar garden in New York City. With the help of the city and prominent financiers (like Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt), they established the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx on land that once belonged to a tobacco merchant named Pierre Lorillard.
Today the 250- acre site is a U.S. National Historic Landmark and houses 50 gardens and plant collections that contain more than one million plants, including…
• a 50-acre replica of the forest that once covered New York City.
• 30,000 trees, many more than 200 years old.
• an 11-acre azalea garden
• 3,500 rose plants, in over 600 varieties.
• more than 8,000 orchids.
• 90 different kinds of lilacs in colors from white to pale blue to deep purple.
• a greenhouse that includes an ecotour of the world, highlighting tropical rain forests, deserts, carnivorous and aquatic plants, and one of the world’s largest collections of palm trees.
• 100-year old tulip trees averaging 90 feet high.
There are approximately 6,000 delis in NYC.